Nancy Graves facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Nancy Graves
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Graves, c. 1959
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| Born | December 23, 1939 |
| Died | October 21, 1995 (aged 55) New York City, U.S.
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| Education | Vassar College, Yale University |
| Known for | Sculptor, Painter, Printmaker |
Nancy Graves (born December 23, 1939 – died October 21, 1995) was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and sometimes a filmmaker. She was famous for her art that focused on things found in nature, like camels or maps of the Moon. Her artworks are displayed in many public places. These include the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Brooklyn Museum. When Nancy Graves was only 29 years old, she had her own art show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was the youngest artist and only the fifth woman to have this special honor.
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Early Life and Studies
Nancy Graves was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Her dad was an accountant at the Berkshire Museum. He helped her become interested in art, nature, and anthropology (the study of human societies and cultures). After finishing her studies in English Literature at Vassar College, Graves went to Yale University. There, she earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in art. Many other famous artists also studied at Yale around the same time. These included Brice Marden, Richard Serra, and Chuck Close.
In 1964, after graduating, she received a Fulbright Scholarship. This allowed her to study painting in Paris, France. She then moved to Florence, Italy. Throughout her life, she traveled to many other countries. These included Morocco, Germany, India, and China. She was married to fellow artist Richard Serra from 1965 to 1970.
Her Amazing Artworks
Nancy Graves was a very busy artist. She created art using painting, sculpture, printmaking, and film. She became well-known in the New York art world in the late 1960s and 70s. Her first big works were life-size sculptures of camels. They looked so real, like something you would see in a natural history museum! She collected art by Alexander Calder and David Smith. Her own sculptures often used welded parts and found objects, similar to theirs.
Her most famous sculpture is called Camels. It was first shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This sculpture has three separate camels. Each one is made from many different materials. These include burlap, wax, fiberglass, and even animal skin. She also painted them with acrylics and oil colors to make them look very realistic. Today, these camels are kept at the National Gallery of Canada. Two similar camel sculptures are in Germany.
Graves also used unusual materials like Fiberglas, latex, and marble dust. Later, she started making art from camel skeletons and bones. She would place these bones on the floor or hang them from the ceiling. In her work Variability of Similar Forms (1970), she sculpted 36 individual camel leg bones. Each bone was almost as tall as a person. She arranged them standing upright on a wooden base.
In the early 1970s, she made five films. Two of them, Goulimine, 1970 and Izy Boukir, showed camels moving in Morocco. This was inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's old motion-study photographs.
Around 1980, Graves started making colorful, open sculptures. One example is Trace, a very large tree sculpture. Its trunk was made from bronze ribbons, and its leaves were steel mesh. In the early 1980s, she became famous for her brightly colored sculptures. These were playful mixes of everyday objects cast in bronze. She used things like plants, machine parts, tools, and even food items.
Graves also created unique aerial landscapes. These artworks were mostly based on maps of the Moon and similar sources. An example is her lithograph VI Maskeyne Da Region of the Moon. These works show things from a view from above.
In her later work, Graves used a technique called lost wax casting. This allowed her to cast delicate objects in bronze. She then used these bronze pieces to create new arrangements. Her art colors changed over time. They were very bright in the 1980s, then became more "subtle" in the 1990s.
Some of Nancy Graves's other artworks include:
- Goulimine (film, 1970)
- Izy Boukir (film, 1971)
- VI Maskeyne Da Region of the Moon (lithograph, 1972)
- Fragment (painting, 1977)
- Wheelabout (sculpture, 1985)
- Hindsight (sculpture, 1986)
- Immovable Iconography (sculpture, 1990)
- Footscray (oil on canvas, paint, and sculpture)
- Metaphore & Melanomy, (cast bronze, 1995)
- Camels, VI, VII, VIII (wood, steel, burlap, polyurethane, wax, oil paint, 1969)
- Fossils (Plaster, dust, marble dust, acrylic and steel, 1970)
- Calipers (Hot-rolled steel, 1970)
- Shaman (Latex on muslin, wax, steel, copper, aluminum wire, gauze, oil paint, marble dust, and acrylic, 1970)
- Variability and Repetition of Similar Forms II (Bronze and COR-TEN steel, 1979)
- Trambulate (Bronze and carbon steel with polyurethane paint and baked enamel, 1984)
Towards the end of her life, Graves started adding handblown glass to her sculptures. She also experimented with poly-optics, a material like glass that can be molded.
Nancy Graves lived and worked in Soho, New York City. She also had a studio in Beacon, New York.
Art Shows and Exhibitions
Nancy Graves had her first art show in New York in 1968. Since 1980, her art was shown by M. Knoedler & Company. She had many exhibitions in galleries across the United States and Europe. Her art is also in museums all over the world. A big museum show of her work was put together by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. This show later traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 1987. In 1987, a sculpture by Nancy Graves was placed at the entrance of the Rainbow Room in New York City. In 2019, a special show called "Nancy Graves: Mapping" was held.
Awards She Received
- Skowhegan Medal for Drawing/Graphics (1980)
- New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award (1986)
- Honorary Degree, Skidmore College (1989)
- Elected into the National Academy of Design (1992)
Nancy Graves in Other Art
Mary Beth Edelson created a famous artwork in 1972 called Some Living American Women Artists / Last Supper. In this piece, she used Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting The Last Supper. Edelson replaced the heads of Christ and his apostles with the heads of important women artists. Nancy Graves's head replaced John the Baptist's, and Georgia O'Keeffe's replaced Christ's. This artwork helped celebrate women artists.
Her Passing
Nancy Graves created her last artworks in April 1995 in Washington state. In May, less than a month later, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She passed away that October, at the age of 55.
See also
In Spanish: Nancy Graves para niños
- Aerial landscape
